Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Er, what was that settting again?

One of the nice features of the Emerald SL client is that it has a LOT of Windlight presets. Admittedly, many of them would be irritating to have on all the time, but they make for some striking photographs:

So everybody's happy... there's no way one can mess this up, right? Wrong. Remember how there's a problem with shadows enabled that makes snapshots come out black, so you have to use screenshots? Well, I took my screenshot, went on my way, and then opened it up in GIMP to crop the UI and stuff out of the picture--and I noticed that at the instant the screenshot capture happened, I had the mouse cursor sitting near the portion of the UI that shows one's location, and a little popup explaining that was smack dab in the middle of the image.

Go back to last location... uh, which Windlight setting was that again? Maybe this one... no. Maybe... no. Eek! So, I hope that the GIMPery to hide the popup isn't too obvious.

Time to suggest that metadata (camera location and direction it's looking, and oh, I don't know... Windlight settings?) be stored with snapshots, and to check up on the JIRA entry for snapshots and shadows.

5 comments:

When you take a picture (Ctrl-S or Ctrl-Alt-~) with shadows enabled, all you see is black and nothing else? Only thing I can guess it might be your video card (I have a GTX260). When I try taking a snapshot with shadows enabled, shadows don't come out. Also, my base avatar doesn't cast a shadow, except for a few seconds when changing clothes and when in avatar edit mode and a few seconds after that. Everybody eles's avatar casts a shadow.

Actually, in the preview I see things on the ground, and the sky is solid black. The image saved to disk is totally black (at least the PNG is; I should check what it does for BMP. I bet it's like the preview, because the last location BMP file is like the previews, with only the sky black).